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Going outside the box to create a classroom experience unlike any other!

Challenge Friday: Visualizing with Legos

Since we’ve been working on visualizing text all week, it seemed appropriate to make Challenge Friday somehow related to visualizing. I also needed to give the kids a quick quiz to see how they are doing with visualizing text independently. I decided to find a way to combine the two.

First, I used five different books to create leveled passages as I had done earlier in the week. Then I created two questions for each passage that were in SOL-style multiple-choice about visualization. The kids would have to answer those two questions and then draw a picture of what the text said. The questions were about the details in the passage that helped you to picture things. For example, “What detail best helps the reader to picture what the cat looks like?” and, “What did the cyclops’s voice probably sound like when he said, ‘I’ll eat you all!’?”

Some kids, who throughout the week seemed to have no problem visualizing text, had trouble with those two questions. Some didn’t understand how specific details can be used to visualize specific things. Others just didn’t read the question carefully or didn’t know what the question was asking. Their pictures were also very helpful because it showed which kids focus on one detail and ignore all the other description and action around it versus kids who notice all the details and use all of it to make their pictures. It all showed where misunderstandings were in vocabulary or phrasing of certain sentences. One student who read this sentence about a cyclops, “He was fifty feet tall,” showed a huge misunderstanding in his picture. He had drawn a dark cave, which it DID mention in the text, but in the cave was a person with a label that said, “this person walked 50 feet.” All of these observations about each student’s answers to the three parts of the quiz really helped me to see how they were visualizing and how I can help them pay attention to the details in the text better.

After I had gone over the quiz with each student, we met on the carpet to talk about challenge Friday. Their challenge today was to make the scene from the passage they had read on the quiz using Legos. It was particularly challenging because the scene that they made had to match the details from the passage that they read. I gave the passages back to them so that they could refer to them as needed. It was fun to watch how they creatively used the pieces to match the color, size, and objects from the passage. For example, one student read a passage about a man who walked through a river and was wearing heavy rain boots. She attached two blue flowers to the bottom of a Lego minifigure’s legs to be the rain boots. Other students used flagpoles and sticks as swords for their minifigure to battle a hydra.
(on a side note, doing these passages that came directly from the leveled books in my classroom library also encouraged the children to try books that they otherwise had ignored on the bookshelf. I have had many students ask me this week about where the book is that their passage came from because they would like to read the rest of it.)